REDDISH-GREEN Eric Langley

Since redness and greenness, or yellowness and blueness, are never simultaneously evident in any other colour, but rather appear to be mutually exclusive, I have called them opponent colours. … There are no colors that appear simultaneously reddish and greenish.

~ Ewald Hering, Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense, 1905

I. All goes it then, my time of

reddish-green

– my mornings lovely –

back down to a cosy pack-up, shut-up to a spectral whitening, shunted off to spurious,

and picked out as some unsayable contraband and taken

to be stood up in the under-hand

just left alone, and sullen to the middle-grey.

II. Beneath the bright blue of the sky, – the basic phenomenal laws of colour –

it all goes blueish-yellow, reddish-green, and gets itself unspoken and unseen, and then, in time, it comes to sit smack-down, right in the interdict.

III. In time, these now forbidden colours –

prone to flash, to acting up and off and out across opposing channels – became so-so

so impossibly hot chromatic that they – beyond their gamut – were just too-too violent splashy.

IV. There is difference you see – red versus green blue versus yellow black versus white – along all the opponent channels, every hard-wired wavelength, agonies of long rods

and short cones, demanding difference, and so you can’t let be, in reddish-green.

V. I thought you knew I saw such things,

such iridescent things

moony stygian by the light of the brilliant M-cone green with a red sheen red dust on a field of green I thought we grew flicker-matched in hyper-lime and saw such coupled things and thought I was incredibly saturated incredibly saturated.

When confronted – deep in the coloured shades –

good yellow damps by darkness, makes demands demands demanding purple.

And blue weakens, weaks by light, approaching all

the most most beautiful violets – phantastically unnecessary – all the most most excitable

extra spectral magentas

VI. But true colours, all yellowish-blue,

hole out after all affects in my cross-eyed short sight, all yellowish-blue.

We get so soft-wired so soft-wired for some long sniff of an afterimage, that goes long-gone goes missing and forbidden in the red-green.

VII. It seems that all

that was bright was –

BRIGHTER THAN ABSOLUTE WHITE

all that was done was –

DONE UP IN HYPERBOLIC ORANGE

and was not

real; not real,

when all is said, as X is real, and Y was done,

as Z. What rot.

but was impossibly coloured astonishing purpur

VIII.

In color theory and perceptual practice, two color naming combinations are forbidden – reddish greens and bluish yellows – however, when multicolored images are stabilized on the retina, their borders fade and filling-in mechanisms can create forbidden colors. The sole report of such events found that only some observers saw forbidden colors, while others saw illusory multicolored patterns [or] spurious pattern formation, [suggesting that] reddish

green and yellowish blue colors can be created – in violation of Hering’s laws of color opponency – by stabilizing bipartite colored fields and allowing the colors to bleed across the perceptually fading border. They found that

some observers see

novel mixture colors undreamt of in Hering’s philosophy.

~ Vincent A. Billock et al, Optical Society of America, 2001

IX. Dream for reddish-green and undreamt novelties. For such soft-wiring. For (fragile)

interactions between cortical colour-sensitive cells. X. Look back now

for our lost our long electric blues, between the ghost white and the milked cerulean air; the blewe cote of the hevens, and the vast and sullen swell, brightening,

azure in our eyes –

it is, it is in our power to believe that such animals have existed

– as the good, the noble, the beautiful, the useful, the common, bleed ’cross fading borders: & winner-takes-it-all.

XI. There was some particular shade

there

– raised on its horse-haunches –

that only love-struck demons and lovelorn goblins saw:

among a glaucous kobalt mist

of smalt and oxide, arsenic and copper, snug to the cool-black coalface quite quite invisibly happy to its time and unimaginable in its place.

Truly yellowish-blue: really seen, reddish-green.

II. Look out for a lost true blue,

between the colour white and the air; the blewe of hevens and the vast swell, but brightening

azure by our eyes

XIII. Typically

the perception of these phenomena would last a few

hot seconds before the entire field would switch abrupt

to black

and, interestingly interestingly

after our experiments

lovely and yes astonishing

two subjects noted that reddish-green that reddish-green

could now be imagined